Supreme Court Finds Vermont Campaign Finance Law Unconstitutional

By a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that the restrictions on contributions and spending violated constitutional free-speech rights.

According to the Associated Press, the Court found Vermont’s limits on contributions and spending in political campaigns too low:

In a fractured set of opinions, justices said they were not sweeping aside 30 years of election finance precedent but rather finding only that Vermont’s law — the strictest in the nation — sets limits that unconstitutionally hamstring candidates.

The majority took issue with Vermont legislators for “constraining speech” by telling candidates and voters how much campaigning was enough.

At SCOTUSblog, Lyle Denniston posts "the Court issued four opinions for the majority and two for the dissent." The ruling decided three consiolidated cases - Randall v. Sorrell, Vermont Republican Commiitte v. Sorrell, and Sorrell v. Randall.

A victory for free speech even if 30 years of election finance precedent is not swept aside.

The court said that the law's limits on how much a candidate could spend violated a landmark 30-year-old ruling equating such spending with free speech and that its limits on donations to a campaign were far too stringent.

The court offered in a 1976 case, Buckley v. Valeo, what has turned out to be an enduring if controversial framework for those issues. The justices said that some limits on donations were constitutional as part of an effort to control the influence of money in politics. But the court said that the money a candidate spent in an election was equivalent to free speech and any limit on that would be an unconstitutional infringement on that right.

The debate has raged over the years and produced a handful of other rulings, none of which upset the basic framework of the 1976 opinion. The court today upheld the 1976 ruling, deciding that some limits on donations were acceptable but that restricting campaign spending was unconstitutional.

[. . .]

The Vermont law set the lowest limits in the nation on donations, capping gifts at $200 for state House campaigns over a two-year election cycle; $300 for state Senate and $400 for statewide offices. In his controlling opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer noted that the court had allowed limits on donations in other states but said that the ones put forward by Vermont imposed burdens on the First Amendment that were "disproportionately severe."

His ruling, parts of which were joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, said that the Vermont law's donation limits raise "substantial restrictions on the ability of candidates to raise the funds necessary to run a competitive election." He said that the low limits on how much an individual could donate to a candidate made it especially difficult for challengers, thus giving an undue advantage to incumbents.

On the more contentious issue of limiting the amount of money a candidate could spend, Justice Breyer wrote, "We can find here no special justification that would require us to overrule Buckley."

The Vermont law limited the amount a candidate for governor may spend in a two-year election cycle to $300,000; a candidate for lieutenant governor to $100,000, and other statewide offices to $45,000. State senators and representatives would be limited to spending between $4,000 and $2,000, depending on their district.

Justice Breyer said the state had demonstrated neither any increase in corruption nor that capping campaign spending was the only way to attack corruption.